[Nix-dev] Some NixOS beginner questions...

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 30/03/14 23:01, Ben Franksen wrote:

> (2) It seems impossible to install NixOS w/o installing the boot loader. 

You can set:

  boot.loader.grub.device = "nodev";

to prevent the installation of GRUB in the MBR while still generating a GRUB
configuration in /boot that might be used for chainloading.

It should be possible to install on a partition as well, but that might not work
with GRUB 2 due to the increased size (never tried).  You can try GRUB 1 instead:

  boot.loader.grub.version = 1;

> (3) I love the declarative approach to system configuration. However, for a 
> newcomer it is hard to find out how to configure his favorite packages. What 
> options are there and how can I set them? 

Unfortunately, we currently lack a way to enumerate Nixpkgs configuration
options (as opposed to NixOS options, which are in the configuration.nix manpage
and the manual).

> (4) How do I fix something if it is broken? Note I don't want to upgrade my 
> whole NixOS configuration to the unstable branch (as all the documentation 
> suggests), just make one or two fixes in certain packages (e.g. the nedit 
> package is currently broken, when starting the binary it crashes with some 
> X11 bad opcode error). I expected the nixpkgs repository to have a 'stable' 
> branch so I could check that out and work from there but such a branch seems 
> not to exist. How else can I replace/fix/change the nix expression for a 
> single package, leaving the rest of the system as is?

As you already found out, release-13.10 is the Git branch corresponding to the
current stable release.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/